To the Editor: Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright says the United States is not advocating an international peacekeeping force for East Timor without the permission of the Indonesian Government. Your Sept. 7 front-page article goes further...

September 9, 1999, Thursday

To the Editor: Judith Butler's defense of ''bad writing'' (Op-Ed, March 20) twists the issues. No one seriously insists that all academic prose be immediately understandable to someone in the street or even to the professor down the hall.

March 24, 1999, Wednesday

To the Editor: In his review of ''Fashionable Nonsense,'' by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (Nov. 15), Jim Holt complains that the authors do not appreciate the depths of the post-modern condition. He writes: ''As a theory whose correspondence to...

Does anything exist outside culture? Is there anything that we do that is free of the distortions of our tastes and customs? That isn't irrevocably shaped by the languages we speak or our material interests? Is there anything out there that we can...

November 15, 1998, Sunday

To the Editor: Re ''Physicists Take Philosophes to Task in Paris Book'' (news article, Oct. 4): Alan Sokal's and Jean Bricmont's latest attack on postmodernist thought -- for its misuse of scientific language -- is directed against what is at most...

October 11, 1997, Saturday

In the country that invented Cartesian logic, the philosopher is king. So Alan Sokal, professor of physics at New York University, and Jean Bricmont, a colleague at the University of Louvain in Belgium, may be in big trouble. In a book published...

October 4, 1997, Saturday

To the Editor: John Horgan, in "Science Set Free From Truth" (Op-Ed, July 16), is right to criticize subjectivist and "postmodernist" thinking in science and philosophy, even (or especially) when it comes from eminent physicists. But he errs...

July 22, 1996, Monday

To the Editor: In deploring Alan Sokal's prank article in Social Text and our book, Jonathan Roughgarden and his students (letter, June 3) display a touching faith in the reasonableness of postmodern commentary on science. The "critical...